Laser-Induced Linear Electron Acceleration in Free Space

Abstract

Linear acceleration in free space is a topic that has been studied for over 20 years, and its ability to eventually produce high-quality, high energy multi-particle bunches has remained a subject of great interest. Arguments can certainly be made that such an ability is very doubtful. Nevertheless, we chose to develop an accurate and truly predictive theoretical formalism to explore this remote possibility in a computational experiment. The formalism includes exact treatment of Maxwell's equations, exact relativistic treatment of the interaction among the multiple individual particles, and exact treatment of the interaction at near and far field. Several surprising results emerged. For example, we find that 30 keV electrons (2.5% energy spread) can be accelerated to 7.7 MeV (2.5% spread) and to 205 MeV (0.25% spread) using 25 mJ and 2.5 J lasers respectively. These findings should hopefully guide and help develop compact, high-quality, ultra-relativistic electron sources, avoiding conventional limits imposed by material breakdown or structural constraints.

Supplementary Information starts on pg 16

References in corpus (8)

• A Femtosecond Nanometer Free Electron Source
• Developments in laser-driven plasma accelerators
• Relativistic electron beams driven by kHz single-cycle light pulses
• A Rigorous Derivation of Electromagnetic Self-force
• Effects of Radiation-Reaction in Relativistic Laser Acceleration
• Electron acceleration driven by ultrashort and nonparaxial radially polarized laser pulses
• On the validity of the paraxial approximation for electron acceleration with radially polarized laser beams
• All-optical three-dimensional electron pulse compression

Cited by in corpus (8)

• From attosecond to zeptosecond coherent control of free-electron wave functions using semi-infinite light fields
• Interaction of ultraintense radially-polarized laser pulses with plasma mirrors
• On the importance of frequency-dependent beam parameters for vacuum acceleration with few-cycle radially-polarized laser beams
• Influence of longitudinal chromatism on vacuum acceleration by intense radially polarized laser beams
• Focused fields of ultrashort radially-polarized laser pulses having low-order spatio-temporal couplings
• Long-term Hybrid Stabilization of the Carrier-Envelope Phase
• Unforeseen advantage of looser focusing in vacuum laser acceleration
• Transverse Confinement of Electron Beams in a 2D Optical Lattice for Compact Coherent X-Ray Sources